The frescoes at Swarthmore depict
conditions and concepts out of the life of our times in America. Painted in a
buildingdevoted to the teaching of engineering science, out of which has
developed industrialization as one of the orienting conditions of modern life,
most of the work deals with the effects of that condition upon human beings,
ourselves and our fellow-men. The murals do not pretend to give a factual
account of those effects, nor to tell a story. Rather they are a
dramatization of the human values involved, of the people of our times in
the struggles and aspirations that constitute the fundamental realities of a
civilization and a culture.

Mural art has a twofold function. Its
esthetic one, as in all ages and civilizations, is to give to the wall colors
and patterns that will be pleasing to the eye and in harmony with the
surrounding architecture. As we have in America no long or well developed
tradition of decorative art, the painter is inescapably a voyager, seeking by
intuition and observation those colors and patterns and densities that have the
capacity for growing to seem right and familiar to our eyes. The work at
Swarthmore is frankly an experiment in which both the artist and those who live
with the work, the faculty, students and workmen of the college, are
participants mutually, and time alone can determine the stature of the work as a
contribution to a genuinely American culture.

The further function of a mural painting
that is to go beyond the purely decorative is to communicate something of the
spirit of man and of the times in which the work is done; something of the
circumstances of life that have a meaning for the majority of people. Hence the
devotion of these spaces to the common, the universal aspects of contemporary
life rather than to the exotic or the romantic. Such things as work and
war and unemployment and the great structures of dams arc all familiar to us,
conditioning our lives and thoughts whether we have been close to the physical
reality or not. Thus I have painted them, and to the men and women involved I
have given the mien and character of people we have known and worked with, loved
or mourned, as likewise I have depicted them with that essential dignity and the
will or the resignation with which people everywhere meet the fortunes of
circumstance.

Dealing with life itself and derived from that
life that is familiar to all of us, it is inevitable that the paintings should
trace on the minds of people looking at them views as divergent as the antipodal
opinions that men everywhere arrive at regarding the same reality. That there
should be discussion and differing opinions over the work, therefore, is to be
expected, and in the degree in which it may cause people to ponder the realities
of our times may be the measure of its contribution to the real educational and
cultural mission of the college.

I. Science and Poverty: A group of
scientist-engineers are absorbed in their work about a table, while in the
foreground an aged woman, seeking the material necessities of life, salvages a
potato from a pile of refuse. At the foot of one of the scientists,
between himself and the woman seeking food, is a gear wheel and a pile of
artillery shells, suggesting both the constructive and destructive possibilities
of science.

The representation of the
co-existence of the condition of poverty and want with engineering science, the
available means for eliminating them, may suggest the moral problem that
confronts society: with regard to the constant use of scientific and engineering
facilities constructively to fill legitimate human needs and to prevent their
misuse for destructive ends.

II. Work: The constructive application of engineering
science.Men entering a mill to work, a daily
occurrence in many parts of our highly industrialized country, suggests
something of the vast tide that pours in and out of factory gates. It is a
simple, familiar act that constitutes one of the aspects of our civilization
which distinguishes it from those of the past, and is depicted
here with some of the rush and movement that seem peculiarlyAmerican.

III. Unemployment: The failure to utilize
productive facilities. Men outside the walls of an idle factory.
The stacks give out no smoke, and the wall separating the men from the
factory, from the means of producing those things which they and others need,
looms large and solid. With one of the men is a little girl as symbol of
the fact that behind every man there are wives or children or old people who
suffer also when he is without work. A feeling of somberness and
quiescence pervades the scene of that condition we call
"Depression," to convey something of the tragic situation of human
beings out of work.

I. War: Soldiers fallen under a mass of guns and steel, while
over them wave flags of different colors. The whole is surmounted by emblems of
aggressor or imperialist nations, among which are the swastika and fasces of
contemporary significance; an imperial eagle, symbolizing conquest; and behind
them the dove of peace which surmounts the sceptre of imperial Britain. .

The prone figures flung over one another, the fragment pattern
of weapons and wreckage and the sweep of the flags over the mass have been
interwoven to convey a feeling of the war machine overwhelming men with its
fury, chaos and ruin.

II. The Refugee: A man, a woman with a child and a
little girl flee from the war chaos. A flag almost touches them, and the swastika
seems to reach out over them. In the background, wreckage and a fiery sky.

The representation of the plight of the peoples of our times
in many portions of the earth links the two major themes of War and Peace; the
family group, together with the woman in the first panel of the side wall and
man and child in the third, provide a recurrent motif of "the
individual" within the larger struggles and movements.

III. Peace: Constructive elements in society,
represented by four men of engineering, laboring, farming and cultural
occupations standing shoulder to shoulder across a factory background. From the
chimneys smoke rolls across t h e sky, suggesting the activity of production.
Massed men on either side give support to the four central figures, and
some of them have hands raised in resolution for peace.

The painting depicts peace as an ordered,
productive society achieved through the cooperation and resolution of
constructive elements of mankind. Hence the grouping of all elements about the
four dominant figures of men of work standing together in peace and dignity as
masters of their environment. The tools and book which they hold contrast
sharply with the destructive implements, the misused potentialities of society,
which appear in the panel War.

The vertical panels which interspace the windows have been
utilized for further concepts of peace. In the corner, adjacent to the rear
wall, is a painting of wheat and a grain elevator. The handclasp, a universal
gesture of good will, is used in the two central panels. In the one,
different races art depicted, a brown hand and a white clasping across a curved
horizon. in the other, hands clasp across smoke-stacks and ripe grain, emblems
of productiveness.

At the extreme left and right, two narrow panels depict
concepts of culture and education related to the conditions of Peace and
War represented on the rear wall. The left panel, with the harmonious relation
of the book and tools, emblems of education, labor and engineering, suggests on
order of peace and growth. The opposite one, with a bomb plunging through a book
under a swastika-surmounted flag, depicts the pillaging of culture and education
under the rule of violence.

The three central panels, with their dominant position in the
room, have ken devoted to aspects of engineering, suggesting the purpose of the
building. They have been treated as simply as possible in order not to distract
the attention of lecture audiences. The large central space shows the engineers
at work with materials of construction in the back-ground. On the right is
a row of the dark houses of laborers over which towers a factory, the typical
cross-section of any mill town in America. Opposite this is an irrigation dam
rising above the growing corn. One of the dramatic recreations of the engineer,
it is depicted not simply as structure, but as a useful machine contributing to
the fulfillment of human needs: the broad, moral objectives of engineering and
science